Woolf's To the Lighthouse

Chapter 6: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse  I Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) is a book with the simplest of plots. Here is how one critic, Robert Humphrey, has described it in Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel. As the title implies, the substance of the novel is the attempt of the characters to get to the lighthouse, which is on an island a few miles from where they are gathered. The novel opens with this emphasized: “‘Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,’ said Mrs. Ramsay. ‘But you’ll have to be up with the lark,’ she added.” Mrs. Ramsay is telling her son, James, that he can go to the lighthouse if the weather will permit it. The book closes, after ten years have passed and Mrs. Ramsay is dead, with James finally, and for the first time, arriving at the lighthouse. (101–2) 151 As Humphrey drily remarks, the novel’s interest does not lie in its action. The novel is about vision, in all its various forms, from conventional perception in the everyday world to aesthetic epiphany. However, the novel is not a simple catalogue of the kinds and conditions of vision; it is about conflict of vision, the struggle to achieve the epiphanic transfiguration in a dulled world of customary ways of seeing. This dialectical struggle has run as an undercurrent of contention throughout the history of aestheticism in England, from its first formulation in Walter Pater’s The Renaissance, discussed in Chapter Two, to its most important twentieth century re-capitulation in Bloomsbury modernism. The inclusive semi-mystical moment or, to put it another way, the luminous moment of immediate Virginia Woolf (Photo: G. C. Beresford, 1902)  apprehension of the real, stands at the very heart of British aestheticism and it takes its particular shape and inflections from its evolution in the social and moral climate of late Victorian times. The moral prejudices of the Victorians cast aestheticism into perdition, simply seeing it as a species of moral corruption. Aestheticism’s identification of the good with the beautiful was the problem; it re-directed the central Victorian value of moral duty to aesthetic ends: namely duty to art, to refinement of artistic sensibility, and to oneself. For the moralizing Victorians these commitments put aestheticism in a bad odour. One of the signal events in this conflict occurred in 1895 during the libel and sodomy trials of Oscar Wilde. The particulars of Wilde’s sexual activities were soon escalated by the public media into a trial of aestheticism itself. Wilde’s conviction deflated the spirit of the Yellow Nineties, discrediting anyone associated not only with Wilde himself, but with the ideas that the public felt he stood for. Many of the protagonists hurried into exile, either foreign, as Wilde did after his release from Reading Gaol, or inward, as in the sudden popularity of Christian conversion, especially to the rich artistic traditions of the Roman Church. Thereafter, aestheticism went underground for at least a generation, re-emerging, in a new form, with modernism, in the work of James Joyce and others, but especially in the aesthetic ideology of the Bloomsbury Group. It would be a mistake to unreflectively align modernism, even the Bloomsbury variety, with aestheticism. What one ought to say is that modernism would not have been possible in the form we have it without the aestheticist prelude. Modernism drew on the aestheticism of Pater and the 1890s for some of its principal ideas, but that was not enough to bring aestheticism back from its scandal- plagued demise. What was required was a new orientation of aesthetic principle emphasizing two things, the objective element, making the art-object as object more philosophically viable, and a new account of consciousness, that moved beyond Pater’s rather exquisite, but passive, impressionism, with its subversive potential for a suspect hedonism. A clearer focus on the artifact is what Joyce accomplishes at the end of A Portrait in Stephen’s lecture. But it is also given a further theoretical formulation in two important contributions by members of the Bloomsbury Group, Roger Fry and Clive Bell’s notion of “significant form” as expressed in various works, but principally in Vision and Design and Art respectively. Bell’s Art was published first in 1914, although Fry had been writing about form in modern works of art since 1909. Bell addressed himself to that wide audience of perplexed gallery goers in England who had only just begun to look at modern visual art,  principally at the two Post-Impressionist exhibitions organized by Roger Fry at the Grafton Galleries in London in 1910 and 1912. I think it safe to say that the exhibition of Cezanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, and the early Picasso at these two exhibitions changed the course of British art, both as artistic practice and as critical theory. On the theory side, these exhibitions complicated the whole question of aesthetic form and led to a good deal of discussion in artistic circles in England, discussions which Bell’s book was meant to inform. The primary point around which these discussions swirled was a formal one. Advanced aesthetic opinion now seemed to accept that a subject, whether a still-life, landscape, portrait, or arrangement of lines, was to be considered primarily for the formal interest it contained, rather than for its ‘truth-to-life’ or its moral content, its decorative appeal or its narrative interest. The handling of shape, colour, line, and volume far outweighed the sentimental attachments to representational values that were written off as dead conventions. The autonomy of form was a key issue in Fry’s promotion of Post-Impressionism. Precisely because this art relied for its most striking effects on formal strength rather than associated ideas, it achieved, he wrote in “An Essay on Aesthetics” (1909), “classic concentration of feeling.” The Post-Impressionist work arrived at a more durable representation of appearance than Impressionism or the older academic traditions of painting. It therefore had a “lasting hold on the imagination.” For Fry, the principal standard of value in art was whether or not the emotional elements of design inherent in the subject had been adequately discovered. This is strikingly similar to T. S. Eliot’s notion, about a decade later, that the writer creates an “objective correlative” in order to express emotion in the form of art (Selected Essays 124). Clive Bell, taking Fry’s ideas a step further, roundly declared that “significant form” was at the root of all aesthetic experience, and that representation was irrelevant. Significant form he wrote was simply “arrangements and combinations that move us in a particular way.” It was, he insisted, a more authentic and vigorous way of apprehending reality than ways of seeing blinded by custom and convention. It gave back to the art-object its objective dimension. In A Portrait, Joyce also helped to liberate from realist conventions the modern novelist’s treatment of time and identity as the building blocks of consciousness. In Ulysses, he took this methodological theme in modernism to a higher level by exploring freely the possibilities granted by his release from traditional views. In this he was not alone. Virginia Woolf’s fiction, from Jacob’s Room (1922) on, pursued this same theme with vigour. In two famous aesthetic statements — her essays “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” and “Modern Fiction” — she puts the stress on the  temporal and subjective elements of the new novel which, running together, make it so innovative in technique. In perhaps her most famous formulation, from “Modern Fiction,” she describes, what we might call, her new ‘realism of consciousness’. If a writer were a free man and not a slave. If he could write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted sense, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible? In “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” Woolf took explicit aim at the English novelists in her time who were still plying the trade of realism, usually in its naturalist form. She asks Bennett, Galsworthy, and Wells, in a tone of dismissive irony, how they might describe a hypothetical character, an aged lady named Mrs. Brown, encountered by accident in a train. Woolf has them reply according to naturalist principle. ‘Begin by saying that her father kept a shop in Harrogate. Ascertain the rent. Ascertain the wages of shop assistants in the year 1878. Discover what her mother died of. Describe cancer. Describe calico. Describe —’ It is perhaps worth comparing her send-up with an actual statement by Emile Zola, the leading exponent of this tendency in the late nineteenth century, about the aims of the naturalist writer: A naturalist writer wants to write a novel about the stage. Starting from this point without characters or data, his first concern will be to collect material, to find out what he can about this world he wishes to describe. He may have known a few actors and seen a few performances. … Then he will talk to the people best informed on the subject, will collect statements, anecdotes, portraits. But this is not all. He will also read the written documents available. Finally he will visit the locations, spend a few days in a theatre in order to acquaint himself with the smallest details, pass an evening in an actress’s dressing-room and absorb the atmosphere as much as possible. When all this material has been gathered, the novel will take shape of its own accord. All the novelist has to do is group the facts in a logical sequence. ... Interest will no longer be focussed on the peculiarities of the story — on the contrary, the more general and commonplace the story is, the more typical it will be. … (quoted in Lukács, Studies in European Realism 90)  It is a great tribute to Zola that, able to believe in the validity of the preceding, he yet managed to bypass it and write interesting novels. Clearly, Woolf was exactly to the point in her criticisms of this deadening theory of writing. If the works of Bennett, Galsworthy, Wells, and Zola have any merit, it comes in spite of, rather than as the product of, their aesthetic professions. Woolf’s two essays add up to an important general argument for a new kind of novel, a kind of fiction which suggests that what makes the modernist novel is not the banality of factualism, or a commonplace truth to life as a slagheap of deadening statistics, nor of a sociological way of understanding and ordering human experience, but a new and more aesthetic way of rendering it from the inside. In a sense, Woolf’s aim is to aestheticize consciousness, Leonard Woolf (Vanessa Bell, 1940)  making it a more appropriate human instrument for the apprehension of the aestheticized object. Her new technique is, in a manner of speaking, true to life, more real than the realists, and true also to the novelist’s feeling about it. But it is also highly selective, cutting out extraneous materials in the interests of giving a purified impression of the varying spirit in life. Her highly evolved sense of selection and intensity gives her fiction a point and focus that is lacking in someone like her contemporary, the novelist Dorothy Richardson, whose own multi-volume work of aestheticized consciousness, Pilgrimage, lacks Woolf’s selective rigour and produces, instead, a feeling of diffusion, slackness, and drift. Having given aesthetic ideology what seemed to be a firmer foundation than anything attempted by Pater and the ‘art for art’s sake’ movement, Bloomsbury also cleansed a renewed aestheticism of its reputation for amoralism. The emphasis on a rigorous regime of honesty and authenticity in personal relationships and in the comradely circle of intimate friends may not have satisfied the stern moralists of Victoria’s day, but it certainly struck a chord with the younger generation in the 1920s. Perhaps it was impossible to take the public world seriously, perhaps it was impossible to see anything other than hypocrisy, bad faith, and blindness out there, but these conditions could be avoided within the circle of friendship by strict adherence to honesty, sympathetic tolerance, non-violence, and the habit of courageous truthfulness. This grounding of the new aestheticism in a set of moral imperatives made it possible for Bloomsbury to help resurrect aesthetic ideology in the changed circumstances of a new age. The aestheticism of the Bloomsbury group also had another moral source. Pater had touched on it in his “Conclusion” to The Renaissance and it remained a theme in aestheticism thereafter. It grew increasingly important as the regimented and bureaucratized character of twentieth century life began to take shape. Pater had warned against the excessive regimentation of life and the formation of habits of perception, thought, and feeling” “for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and in the meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike.” The aesthetic epiphany breaks the moulds of habit; it pierces the thick walls of custom and reflex perception; it sloughs off the clichés, the empty husks of habitual thought and feeling. Pure perception seizes, in immediate apprehension, the quidditas of things, their distinctness, unfiltered by convention. In the name of a higher moral order, reality irradiated by aesthetic consciousness, becomes the destination of authentic experience. The philosophical foundation for Bloomsbury lay in the influential Principia Ethica (1903) by G. E. Moore, the Cambridge philosopher with whom  Interior at Gordon Square (Duncan Grant, c. 1915) many of the group studied and read at the university. His collocation of goodness and beauty as the proper ends of life exerted an enduring influence. The aesthetic is not merely the libidinal zone of fantasy and the satisfaction of personal desires beyond the pull of good and evil. It stands at the very centre of the moral life, if that life is defined as the maximum alertness to experience, the multiplication and quickening of consciousness as  the only way of staying alive in a world in which most people are dead, or at least endure a vampiric existence that is akin to death-in- life. Not really alive, and yet not dead either. F. R. Leavis’s comments about the importance of cultivating a sensible openness to life quoted in Chapter One are rooted in this moralization of the aesthetic. This is one of the implications of Stephen Dedalus’s lecture on art to Lynch in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It also makes sense of his life’s journey and his need to get out from underneath the oppressive weight of family, church, and nation. It is also a key to the conflict of vision in To the Lighthouse. To the Lighthouse represents, in some ways, an extended demonstration of Stephen Dedalus’s lecture to Lynch. But unlike the earlier novel, in which Stephen, the intellectual artist, chooses the rhetorical form of a philosophical disquisition to proclaim his ideas, Virginia Woolf dramatizes the achievement of aesthetic epiphany, not in the abstract and detached form of a lecture, but by plunging her readers in medias res, into the midst of things. Ironically, she makes the husband, Mr. Ramsay, a philosopher so caught up in his own ratiocinative labyrinths that the existential reality of the epiphanic vision, and the lifeworld of feeling to which the epiphany belongs, stands utterly remote from him. Instead, Woolf gives the capacity for such moments of vision to his wife, Mrs. Ramsay, and the painter Lily Briscoe. In a sense, Woolf domesticates the epiphanic moment, or at least brings it down to earth. Lily Briscoe realizes late in the novel the quiet chapter Mrs. Ramsay has to teach, that “the great revelation” perhaps never does come, instead there are “little daily miracles, illuminations” (183). She weaves these little miracles into the very fabric of day-to-day living, rather than maintaining them in splendid isolation as the objects of a cold intellectualism. Woolf quietly involves her novel in the historical debate and conflict about aestheticism, making of it rather a matter of practical survival than a topic divorced from the everyday. In this way, she adds a great deal to that debate, including a crucial gendering of the issue. We will return to the question of gender a little later in the chapter. Bloomsbury trained Woolf to this renewed, and thoroughly English style of aestheticism. It is what I am calling Bloomsbury modernism. She dramatizes the inevitable tensions and collisions between the rapture of aesthetic consciousness as a total life commitment and the dulled lives of those who cannot conceive of the imaginary because of natures artificially fixed by convention, as in Mr. Ramsay’s joyless adherence to “facts uncompromising” (6). The initial conflict in the novel is set out exactly along these lines. Mrs. Ramsay, the champion of the trip to the lighthouse, is opposed by her husband, who answers to her optimism with the deadening retort that the weather “won’t be fine.”  We may not be able to say exactly why going to the lighthouse is important, but we come to know that it is. In order to impress the reader with the significance of going there, Woolf employs another symbolic situation to serve as counterpoint to the symbolism of the journey, or more accurately the journey deferred. This is centered on Lily Briscoe, one of the Ramsays’s guests, who throughout the decade the novel spans, is trying to finish a landscape painting. She finishes it at the precise moment when James arrives at the lighthouse. Then she has, of a sudden, a moment of insight, of inspiration: “With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew the line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision” (237/226). In the 1920s, there is probably no better illustration of the subtle fusion of the epiphany, the doctrine of significant form, and the new fusion of the aesthetic and the ethical. Roger Fry (Self-portrait, 1930 – 4)    II To the Lighthouse is perhaps the most distilled example of the new novel towards which Woolf and her modernist contemporaries were moving all through the 1920s. It employs most of the procedures and techniques that define the type: the attenuation or even the occasional disappearance of the omniscient narrator and the avoidance of the first-person narrative mode; the disappearance of something one might call objective reality conveyed as something generally valid and recognizable; the use of subjective consciousness to present a multiple impression of what is perceived; the use of contrast between exterior, or clock time, and interior, or psychological, time; the presentation of interior life through what seems random association rather than by the convenient artifice of the all-powerful directive will, as if cognitive activity is inevitably always purposeful and directed, rather than having a good deal of the arbitrary in its movements; and, the deliberate undercutting of historical consciousness, diminishing the significance of large exterior events, like the public events in history, or even the deaths of characters. These tactical shifts in composition concentrated attention on consciousness. The modernists explored the variety of possibilities, which this new emphasis offered, each in their own way. For Joyce, in Ulysses, recording the movement of consciousness, the stream of consciousness, afforded a way of connecting the present moment to its archetypes in the ancient world. For Lawrence, too, concerned with his own, less experimental, version of the novel of consciousness, the problem was to break down the stable ego in order to explore the forces at play in the unconscious and to record the symbolic narrative that results. For Woolf, consciousness is intuitive and aesthetic rather than subterranean or mythopoeic; it is the creative energy of the self which makes its own subjective time, and which links the immediate moment with the past in a personal life record of the subject. There is no consciousness that is not deeply autobiographical. Those, like Mr. Ramsay who link their individual fates to external structures of thought, or history, are twisted and folded into the public givens of existence. For example, his reliance on science as the ground of a public, and, therefore, alienated form of knowing, periodically deforms his feelings for his wife and family. When Mrs. Ramsay asks an ‘irrational’ question, he not only fumes in exasperation against her, but against women in general. The extraordinary irrationality of her remark, the folly of women’s minds enraged him. He had ridden through the valley of death and been shattered and shivered; and now she flew in the face of facts, made his children hope what was utterly out of the question, in effect, told lies. He stamped his foot on the stone step. ‘Damn you,’ he said. But what had she said? Simply that it might be fine tomorrow. So it might. Not with the barometer falling and the wind due west. (37–8/37) For Mrs. Ramsay, the truth does not lie in some external authority, like the barometer, but in the delicate tissues of shared consciousness that connect the human group, in this case her family. For her, the husband’s ‘truth’ is experienced as a form of brutality, a rending of the “thin veils of civilization” that keep human beings in synch with each other. To rip them apart in the name of the holy barometer seems “an outrage of human decency” (38/37). Woolf is marvelously tuned to the fragility of the psychic bonds that connect the human group. Perhaps this is a result of living in a time when the forces of modern life had seriously begun to disrupt the bonds of traditional communities, bonds that had persisted without a great deal of conscious exertion for centuries. Now in the twentieth century, it was necessary to build and maintain each community as an ongoing project of feeling. In this task, she seems to suggest, women were better equipped than men. Men built with their intellects, positioning little bits of information one on top of each other like bricks. What is “the square root of one thousand two hundred and fifty-three” (121/115), Mr Ramsay asks, apropos of the number on his railway ticket. The “admirable fabric of the masculine intelligence” sustains a certain narrowed kind of human intercourse. Woolf compares its working to the running up and down of “iron girders … upholding the world” (122/115). Yet, the  circulation of discrete units of information and ideas of this and that is an aimless buzz of sound around the dinner table which Mrs. Ramsay hears but to which she does not listen. Instead she takes in a wider circumference of experience, a wholeness of response that adds up to vision, certainly more than is available in the form of intellectual conversation. [H]er eyes were so clear that they seemed to go round the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and the reeds in it and the minnows balancing themselves, and the sudden silent trout are all lit up hanging, trembling. (123/116) This is epiphany. And it is significant that for Woolf it is an essentially feminine attribute. Men may have the capacity, but it is blocked by their over-developed intellects that are the instruments of their egos. Charles Tansley’s criticism of Walter Scott (“or perhaps it was Jane Austen” — it doesn’t seem to matter which), at dinner again, amounts, for Mrs Ramsay at least, to a rat-a-tat repetition of “‘I - I - I’” He was thinking of himself and the impression he was making, as she could tell by the sound of his voice, and his emphasis and his uneasiness. Success would be good for him. (122/115) Academic success and the recognition of others would not change the topical focus (himself) of his talk, but it would stifle the irritating whine of his male anxieties. When Charles is being ignored at the table and senses that everything is in “scraps and fragments” around him, he wants, desperately, to bring the whole amorphous moment into order through self-assertion and the expression of intellectual opinion (104/98–9). Woolf strikes this off as a male trait. It is opposed by the more integrative potential of female sensibility that fuses the everyday with the visionary: “Nothing need be said; nothing could be said. There it was, all round them.” It partook, she felt, … , of eternity; as she had already felt about something different once before that afternoon; there is a coherence in things, a stability; a something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that remains for ever after. This would remain. (121/114) That this visionary moment occurs in the midst of serving Mr. Bankes “a specially tender piece” of beef for dinner, underlines Woolf’s sense that the epiphanic and everyday life are not necessarily  mutually exclusive, but laced together into the beautifully woven energies of transcendent vision and domestic gesture. Contrast this with Stephen Dedalus’s seaside epiphany in which a perfectly ordinary walk along the beach is transfigured into a mythopoeic quest, as if “the great revelation” had been transferred to another planet of being. And again, contrast the unreal place of women in Stephen’s imagination, either as saintly creatures of mystery or glittering idols of male lust. And as for Stephen’s mother, his silence about her speaks eloquently of Stephen’s (is it also Joyce’s?) incapacity to credit women with the same visionary and intellectual powers as men. Woolf’s Mrs. Ramsay corrects this essentially sexist attitude. She seems to argue that it is the special destiny of women not to indulge themselves in the solitary raptures of a Stephen, but to sustain visionary consciousness as a communal strength hidden from the lonely power-worship of the masculine mind. This far-sighted assessment of the genders and of the relationship between them, a general theme in the 1920s as we saw in Lawrence’s Women in Love, gives Woolf a productive perspective on the psychologies of her characters. It seems clear enough that she acquired a rather sophisticated understanding of the feeling- worlds of men and women. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, she was responding, as did Lewis and Lawrence in their very different ways, to the thematizing of gender relations after World War One as a result of the new position of women in society. One cannot overestimate how the emancipation of women, through the acquisition of the franchise and of money-power, changed the intimate life of the twentieth century. The varied responses to this situation in the novels we’ve been reading — compare Lewis’s views with Woolf’s — attests to the importance of gender as a social thematic in the early decades of the century. Secondly, the Bloomsbury group, and especially Lytton Strachey’s brother James, became very interested in the works of Sigmund Freud that were beginning to have an enormous effect in the 1920s. Indeed James Strachey was closely involved in spreading knowledge of Freud in the English-speaking world through his translations of the works. Woolf and her husband Leonard were themselves materially involved in the dissemination of Strachey’s translations through their private publishing venture, the Hogarth Press, which they operated from their basement in Tavistock Square. They published Strachey’s translations of Freud and in that atmosphere, in which the new psychology was providing important new insights, Woolf would no doubt have become attuned to the revolution in human understanding which we attach to Freud’s name. Of course, this does not mean that Woolf was a Freudian by any stretch of the imagination. Indeed the only one of Freud’s texts that we can be sure she read is Civilization and Its   James Strachey (Duncan Grant, 1910)  Discontents, although she may have been acquainted with Freud’s ideas through contact with Strachey. In any event, she gave aesthetic consciousness too high a place in the human psyche to satisfy an orthodox Freudian. Her subtle awareness of the deeper motivations of human beings, her fine sense of how things are in the emotional worlds of men and women, are valuable nonetheless and give her novels an often more sensible and realistic feel than the rather excited testaments of Lawrence, or the gleeful perversities of Lewis. But Woolf is not usually noted for her psychological perspicuity, at least not among male critics who tend to think of Lawrence as a master psychologist in fiction. What she is noted for, and perhaps rightly, is her fine attunement to beauty and to the quality of her aesthetic sensibility. The novel of consciousness affords her the opportunity of making a prose lyricism of intensified sensitivity and sensation. These are usually rendered in the form of a highly sensitized narratorial consciousness which dominates and unifies the action. In To the Lighthouse, the narrator shifts temporally (forwards and backwards in time) and spatially (from this place to that) in both the individual character and from character to character. The characters may be widely diverse but they all share a common focus in a common symbol, the lighthouse in this case. The narrator, or perhaps we should refer to her as the narrator’s voice, remains in the same condition of immediate responsiveness as the characters, knowing little more than they, sharing their bewilderment and wonder. The events remain essentially internal and the stream or flow of consciousness, though it passes through the fictive contrivances of character, are summed up in the encompassing lyricism of the narratorial voice. This does not add up to the conventional omniscient narrator of a realist novel. Certainly the lyrical voice achieves a kind of omniscience, if this is possible, on a higher plane, by eschewing the down-to-earth or invasive omniscience of realism. Woolf’s writing does not aspire to the condition of drama; there is nothing in To the Lighthouse, or in her œuvre generally, which approaches the dramatic explosions of the Alpine chapters of Women in Love. But then there is nothing in Lawrence that matches the sinuous responsiveness to beauty of Mrs. Ramsay or the most lyrical passages in the “Time Passes” section of the novel. Although some feminist critics like to argue that a novel like To the Lighthouse succeeds in subverting gender-specific ways of being in the world, this is difficult to sustain by a close reading of the text. It is possible to read Woolf’s fiction in this way in a novel like Orlando, for example, which comes at the end of the 1920s. But the intent of To the Lighthouse seems drawn to a dichotomized sense of gender relations. In the novel the male world is represented as materialist, historicist, coldly philosophical, public. The novel evaluates this ethos negatively and repudiates it. The female world, on the other hand, is represented, indeed celebrated, in terms of sensitivity, intuition, beauty, and the domestic sphere. The men who “negotiated treaties, ruled India, controlled finance” are excoriated. In their more pathetic moments, they seek the protection and warmth of sensibilities, notably Mrs. Ramsay’s, attuned to higher things. Woolf’s use of natural imagery — Mrs. Ramsay as flowering fruit-tree (45/44) or the sweetened opulent dome of a beehive (60/58) — in the first part of the novel suggests that behaviour and psychic potential is firmly rooted in the biology of sexual differences. In contrast to this overflowing of natural life the male presence in the novel is figured as stiff and metallic even though it feeds on the fertility of the female, as in the following moment between the Ramsays in the presence of their son James. Standing between her knees, very stiff, James felt all her strength flaring up to be drunk and quenched by the beak of brass, the arid scimitar of the male, which smote mercilessly, again and again, demanding sympathy. (44–5/43) The “very stiff” son standing erect “between her knees,” the beak, the blade of the scimitar are all phallic figures suffering what is hypothesized as the male disease, namely the fatal incompleteness, the folly of “the egotistical man’ (45/44) chafed into a never-ending demand for sympathy and re-assurance by the fertile presence of the mother. She produces all of life and therefore the encompassing sympathy, both physically in her body, and metaphorically in the  domestic hive: “she assured him, beyond a shadow of a doubt, by her laugh, her poise, her competence (as a nurse carrying a light across a dark room assures a fractious child), that it was real; the house was full; the garden blowing” (45/43– 44). The genders may form a dichotomy, but in the economy of the novel it is presented as an unequal one, and significantly as the reverse of the usual patriarchal valencies. The singularly lyrical voice of the narrator that does so much to unify the novel, the narratorial consciousness that moves freely from a position of fertile omniscience, in and out of the characters and then back to omniscience, becomes the perfect embodiment of the summative position of the female. The female produces the world and has the innate capacity to perceive its harmony and beauty. The “fatal sterility of the male,” closely identified with the alienated intellect in the novel, lies inert and barren until “taken within the circle of life” (44/43). Woolf’s narrator in the novel is the outer circumference of the circle of life and we are left in no doubt at all that it is a boundary defined by woman. This symbolic structure is complicated by the position of Lily Briscoe. She is identified with Mrs. Ramsay (59–60/57–8) and is yet rather different. Mrs. Ramsay does not bother to work towards a representation of experience in art, in thought, or any form at all, other than the lovely rituals of the domestic sphere. The reason for this reluctance seems ambiguous. It is either a result of conditioned repression, the silencing of the woman in a patriarchal world, or it is a kind of enlightened indifference to the hysterical striving of men to reproduce the unbearable flux of their experience in the fixed form of knowledge. But Lily is different. She is a painter and she is very good with words as well. She struggles to represent experience from her own point of view, from within the centre of the phallogocentric system that reduces the woman’s perspective to nullity, wittily symbolized by Mr. Bankes with his phallic “penknife” tapping her canvas and challenging her to rationalize her visual effects, specifically the “triangular purple shape, ‘just there’” (61/58). Her place at the very end of the novel, after Mrs. Ramsay’s death, when she completes the painting with the final brushstroke, re-affirms the position of the woman as agent of complete being, now translated to the register of visual art. The final triumph occurs not merely in Mrs. Ramsay’s domain, the domain of being as such, but in the typically male world of represented being, that is of fixing the flux of existence through the sudden epiphany of significant form in the perfected work of art. Here is the liberation of woman to the highest power, the power to inscribe the symbolic order with the truth of her own experience. Winning the franchise and being able to exercise purchasing power were great and historic  victories for women in the 1920s, but to wrest control of the forms of representation and to put them to new tasks was something indeed. A feminist reading of To the Lighthouse would concentrate a great deal of interest on that final, visionary line Lily sets down in the centre of the canvas.   III If Lily’s picture is a perfected work of art, so is To the Lighthouse. By most accounts this is Woolf’s best novel. The lighthouse is clearly symbolic, but Woolf does not tie it down with the heavy baggage of directly accessible meaning. In this she is typically modernist in her approach. But, if it’s a symbol, what does the lighthouse stand for? This question immediately raises a problem in terminology. The problematic term is ‘symbol’ itself. Symbols stand for something else. Usually this something else can be made explicit by acts of critical interpretation in which correspondences are identified between one aspect of the text and another. The house at Pemberley ‘stands for’ the nobility and humanity of Darcy’s character, traits obscured by Elizabeth’s ‘prejudice’, in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The fog in the opening chapter of Dickens’s Bleak House ‘stands for’ the groping bureaucracy of the Chancery court. But what does the bomb in Conrad’s The Secret Agent stand for exactly? A state of mind? The philosophical insecurity of modern times? The chaotic expanse of the urban waste land? The nihilism which lies at the heart of existence? The triumph of worldly cynicism over the innocence of a simple faith? Possibly all of these (and more) or none of them. Yet, the explosion is highly evocative and suggestive; it is a powerful symbol in the novel. Conrad’s modernity lies precisely in this ambiguity. The explosion expands throughout the text and, at the end of the day, one might say that it becomes a symbol for the text itself. No longer simply a rhetorical figure of meaning, the figure fuses meaning and the novel’s overall form. Structure, syntax, point of view, irony, action, characters, setting, and so forth, are unified by the symbol of the exploding bomb. By the time we finish the novel, it has expanded to encompass and unify every aspect of the narrative. This treatment of symbols marks one of the principal compositional initiatives of modernism. The lighthouse seems to function in the same way. It is a symbol, but exactly of what is very hard to ascertain. Indeed some critics have suggested that it is a unifying symbol for the narrative form of the novel. Joan Bennett, for example, asserts that the book reproduces the typical double flash effect of a lighthouse beam. The long first flash is represented by the first section (“The Window”), the interval of darkness represented by the short middle section (“Time Passes”), and the second, shorter flash by the third section (“The Lighthouse”). The action of the lighthouse, the still point in a turning world of light and dark, suggests in a general sense an encompassing trope that brings together the narrative events, settings, and characters. Within the general symbolic structure the novel is organized around a simple journey to the lighthouse. The Ramsays are planning to set out and on the last page, ten years later, James finally arrives. Yet the novel does not give the impression of the passage of time, a decade in this case, as a matter of chronological development or movement. The longest period covered by the narrative, the ten years that pass between the plan to set out and the arrival, are concentrated in the shortest section. The section that corresponds, if we follow Bennett’s typology, with the darkness between the two flashes of light. The longest sections are the most static in that they explore the interiority of characters caught, or suspended, in a luminous moment of time. Again the modernist preoccupation with stasis, with the avoidance of the onward march of conventional history as the framework of experience, determines Woolf’s approach to the organization of the novel. Actual experience, reality, as opposed to habit and custom, only show themselves in particular states of quickened consciousness. And the physiognomy of the real only reveals itself to aesthetic consciousness. Objective, historical events, like for example Mrs. Ramsay’s death or the First World War, are not given much narrative attention. Notice that Mrs. Ramsay’s death is not only reported in the shortest section of the novel but is further relegated to a parenthesis (146 – 47/140). Even a world-historical event, like the War, is buried in a parenthesis. But the loveliness that “reigns” in Mrs. Ramsay’s room after her death is lovingly set down at length (147/140 –1).  Loveliness and stillness clasped hands in the bedroom, and among the shrouded jugs and sheeted chairs even the prying of the wind, and the soft nose of the clammy sea airs, rubbing, snuffling, iterating, and reiterating their questions — ‘Will you fade? Will you perish?’ — scarcely disturbed the peace, the indifference, the air of pure integrity, as if the question they asked scarcely needed that they should answer: we remain. (148/141) The passage of time is the domain of death and is not real. It is the heavy burden of human life. Only art and the aesthetic consciousness, which brings it to life, break time’s grip. They release us from what Stephen Dedalus comes to call, in Ulysses “the nightmare of history.” From this point of view, the ‘still life’, as a genre of painting, is more vital and living than history, the so-called domain of the living, which in Woolf’s estimate is more accurately assessed as death-in-life. As in the case of Wyndham Lewis, the novel in Woolf’s hands increasingly relinquishes the usual storyteller’s commitment to time while adopting, with a more positive vigour, the visual artist’s appreciation for space and spatial organization. The literary critic Joseph Frank, some years ago, tried to describe the turn away from the historical bias of chronological narration as central to modernist literature in his influential 1945 article “Spatial Form in Modern Literature.” He restated and defended his ideas again in Critical Inquiry in 1977 and 1978. Frank argues that the narrative sequence of the modernist text is disrupted as part of an attempt to create an alternative to what he calls the “temporal form” of narrative, by which he means realist forms of narrative. The time-logic of conventional narrative is replaced in the works of Gustave Flaubert and Djuna Barnes (and, one could argue, in the works of Eliot, Pound, Proust, Joyce, and Woolf) by what amounts to a kind of space-logic that effects not only elements like the metaphorical representation of setting, but the very language of the work itself. He argues that: syntactical sequence is given up for a structure depending on the perception of relationships between disconnected word- groups. To be properly understood, these word-groups must be juxtaposed with one another and perceived simultaneously. Only when this is done can they be adequately grasped; for, while they follow one another in time, their meaning does not depend upon this temporal relationship. (12–13) This space-logic is directly opposed to the sequential time-logic of realist narrative and to its basis in an historically inflected sense of time. “Past and present are apprehended spatially, locked on a timeless unity that, while it may accentuate surface differences, eliminates any feeling of sequence by the very act of juxtaposition.”  Frank then associates the time-logic of temporal form, identified with conventional narrative, to historical consciousness and spatial form to an ahistorical and atemporal consciousness. This spatial approach to form is more easily assimilated into aestheticism. The time-world of history is transformed into modalities of the timeless, that is to say, into myth (Joyce), aesthetic epiphany (Woolf), the image (Lewis), and the like (pattern, repetition, even Benjamin’s notion of Jeztzeit) are chosen as forms resistant to history. Frank’s is still a useful account of a basic innovation in the treatment of narrative among the modernists. However, it would be more accurate to say that the turning away from temporal form as the foundation of narrative is a rejection only of the time-logic of history as chronicle, where the meaning of a narrative sequence is determined by the successive unfolding of events in a particular, inviolable order. ‘History’ for Woolf and the other modernists is not abolished, that would be ridiculous, it is re-conceived as pattern and web, rather than line. This revised sense of the historical is not simply a chronicle of events but, like a work of art, has meaningful repetitions and patterns, significant juxtapositions and rhythms. Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and the other modernist works we’ve read, enables a complex series of patterns or analogies or correspondences to emerge. The logic of the text is fundamentally spatial and synchronic, rather than linear and diachronic. Its visual analogy is to be found in the development of modern painting. Post-impressionism, for example, or cubism. Fry and Bell’s de-historicized theories of ‘significant form’ are here highly relevant to the evolution of a Bloomsbury writer like Woolf towards this re-orientation of narrative. Her use of Lily’s painting as a structuring device for the process of the novel itself is very significant. This anti-historical bias was not restricted to the writing of novels. The poetry of Ezra Pound, the imagists, and other modernist poets were deeply influenced by these ideas. It lay also at the heart of T. S. Eliot’s modernist revisions of the meaning of the word Tradition. Tradition does not define a chronology emerging from the dim past, passing through a series of cultural monuments standing in a line and growing increasingly more brightly lit as they near contemporaneity. … what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new … work of art among them …. The existing order is complete …. Whoever has approved this idea of order, of the form of European and English literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past. (Selected Essays 49–50)  ‘Simultaneity’, ‘completeness’, ‘order’ are the key words of this re-orientation of historical consciousness. For modernists, realist history, and the necessity that it entails, was the original sin of the Victorians and the withdrawal from its responsibilities and obligations into an aesthetic enclave awakened the individual artist from the nightmare of history. As a result, Woolf composes her novel much as a painter might compose a picture, a Cezanne for instance, or, more to the point, a Spring in Provence (Roger Fry, 1933)  Lily Briscoe. There is the overriding concern with spatial arrangement, juxtaposition, texture and form. Lines, marks, objects, persons on a canvas are carefully built up to convey the effect of the lived moment in time, not to generate narrative. To the Lighthouse is more fully constructed in painterly terms than Joyce’s metaphorical ‘portrait’. This aspect of Woolf’s novel comes clearly into view in the third part, “The Lighthouse,” where Woolf comes closest to indulging herself in that favorite diversion of the modernist writer, the discussion or lecture or conversation about art and aesthetics. As Lily paints the picture she completes, co-terminally, with the last page of the novel, she thinks about art and about the whole process of making it. That woman sitting there writing under the rock resolved everything into simplicity; made these angers, irritations fall off like old rags; she brought together this and that and then this, and so made out of that miserable silliness and spite (she and Charles squabbling, sparring, had been silly and spiteful) something — this scene on the beach for example, this moment of friendship and liking — which survived, after all these years, complete, so that she slipped into it to re-fashion her memory of him, and it stayed in the mind almost like a work of art. (182–83) To the Lighthouse not only has an aesthetic, it is about the aesthetic view of life. And Woolf’s claim about the aesthetic view of life lies in its redemptive qualities, primarily in feminist terms. But there is a general process at work here which, though taking a feminist form in Woolf, will, later in the century, develop across the whole spectrum of identity politics, from feminism topost-colonialism and on to the political and cultural struggles of the gay, lesbian, and transgendered communities. As mentioned in the previous section of this chapter, the aesthetic in Woolf is marked out as a zone of the feminine and women are finally validated as creators and producers of culture, not simply its consumers or its supine objects (as in the practice of the female nude in painting for example). The aesthetic is further appropriated for an emergent feminine discourse in the early twentieth century by the psychologizing of identity. By re-imagining psychic life in terms of identity and the existential validity of the moment, the politics of the ego are put into crisis. By de-stabilizing the authority of the ego, the aesthetic opens for modernity the whole question of the politics of representing the ‘real’ in the available media, like language as such, or the visual language of the painter. Instead of solving or stabilizing the problem of representation in art, which, in a nutshell, was the function of aesthetic philosophy in its heyday in the eighteenth century, the  aesthetic in the twentieth puts the whole matter into reverse. It re-invents itself as a discipline of thought in opposition to the old stability, a foundation achieved through recourse to Nature and Tradition, both of them terminal categories in the aesthetic philosophy of the past. Rather than being the solution to the problem of representation, modernist aesthetics poses representation as a problem. In aesthetic philosophy before modernity, Nature and Tradition rendered the whole question of representation as largely incontestable by taking the subject out past the limits of argument; the aesthetic of modernism makes it over as a thoroughly contestable subject. Indeed any recourse to the concept of Nature makes representation an issue about which argument is supposedly impossible. It is this general modernist challenge that Woolf gives a feminist inflection. The experience of women in times past was rarely, if ever, acknowledged as being a valid starting point for the pursuit of the beautiful or the real. In contrast, a modernism alert to the relevancy of gender offers a modus operandi for contesting the incontestable in every area of life, from art to gender. In To the Lighthouse, the public culture of a patriarchal society, including its established modalities of representation, is neatly subverted as new points of view force open the settled orthodoxies. Lily Briscoe’s groping struggle to complete her painting in the face of, for example, Charles Tansley’s incomprehension makes the point explicitly. What is accomplished for feminism in Woolf’s novels of the 1920s will be expanded and developed in the latter part of the twentieth century for others, especially after the 1960s with the advent of what is now called ‘postmodernism.’     * Bishop, Edward. Virginia Woolf. London: Macmillan, 1993. Caughie, Pamela. Virginia Woolf and Post Modernism: Literature in Quest and Question of Itself. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Cohn, Ruby. “Art in To the Lighthouse.” Modern Fiction Studies. 8 (1962): 127–36. Humphrey, Robert. Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1962. Kaivola, Karen. “The Lyrical Body in Virginia Woolf’s Fiction.” In All Contrairies Confounded. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. Leaska, Mitchell A. Virginia Woolf ’s Lighthouse: A Study in Critical Method. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1970. Meisel, Perry. The Absent Father: Virginia Woolf and Walter Pater. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980. Moody, A. D. Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1963. Newman, Herta. Virginia Woolf and Mrs. Brown: Toward a Realism of Uncertainty. New York: Garland Publishing, 1996. * Zwerdling, Alex. Virginia Woolf and the Real World. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986. 176 174 Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse 173